It’s easier than ever to create a facade of perfection on Instagram with the recently added feature of beauty filters that can completely change your face. Beauty filters have been around for quite some time, but they have never changed your face as much as they do today. These filters are used to give the illusion of being tan or having porcelain skin. Now, they can change your eye shape, nose shape, the size of your lips, jaw definition and even your eye and hair color. This is extremely harmful to social media users’ mental health. Constantly seeing beauty filters can make people question if their looks are enough for today’s beauty standards, or wonder if they need to undergo cosmetic procedures to fit those standards.
Beauty filters supposedly make us look better but end up making us feel worse than ever before. Is that the price we need to pay to be active social media users? Since introducing beauty filters on social media platforms, the desire for plastic surgery and facial enhancement has drastically increased, especially amongst the youth. It’s very common to see young teenagers using these filters in their pictures, and even more common now to hear them dreaming about getting procedures once they are of age to do so. There is certainly nothing wrong with getting procedures done, but teenagers should not be planning out what they are going to get done once they’re 18 at such young ages. Instead, we should be encouraging the younger generation to love themselves as who they are and teach them that nothing on social media that looks perfect is actually perfect in real life.
It’s really hard to remember that no one is as perfect as they display themselves to be on social media, not even Kylie Jenner or Kim Kardashian. But, we should definitely be focusing on teaching younger generations that social media is in fact a fake reality and not to get too caught up in it because it can be detrimental to one’s mental health. I’m sure as time goes on, there will be studies on how beauty filters have affected users’ mental health and influenced them to change their features. But, maybe we can halt this negative effect by having open and honest conversations, especially with young adults on social media, and remind them that what you see on social media is the perfect version, not the authentic version.
